Desert Isle Keeper
If You Only Knew
Traditionally, the Happily Ever After in romance is that of my generation’s favorite childhood chant. “First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes a baby in a baby carriage.” What marriage…
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Tress
Earlier this year I read and fell head over heels over head over heels in readerly love with Larissa Brown’s Beautiful Wreck. (Melanie’s DIK review is here.) Ms. Brown was…
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Off the Edge
Romantic suspense is one of the most “difficult to do well” sub genres in romance. If the romance works the suspense is often weak. If the suspense is fabulous, the…
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The Last Hour of Gann
Wendy Clyde here. Dabney Grinnan and I are discussing R. Lee Smith’s The Last Hour of Gann, which was released in September. While Dabney had read Ms. Smith, this is…
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Glitterland
It would be easy label Alexis Hall’s debut novel Glitterland as literary fiction masquerading as romance. The language he uses – his metaphors are often show stoppingly gorgeous – and…
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Love and Other Scandals
Caroline Linden’s Love and Other Scandals is the best historical romance I’ve read this summer. Joan Bennet, the spinster heroine, has a sharper tongue and a sharper mind. The louche…
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The Governess Affair
Perhaps my favorite novella in romance is This Wicked Gift, written and published by Ms. Milan in 2009. In it, Ms. Milan presents a hero who forces the heroine to…
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Capturing the Silken Thief
There’s a line in Jeannie Lin’s novella, Capturing the Silken Thief, that evokes the effortless, lyrical beauty of her tale. A man – a scholar – and a woman –…
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A Lady Awakened
Ms. Grant’s excellent debut should really be titled A Lady and a Gentleman Awakened. Both the heroine, repressed Martha, and the hero, feckless Theo, are, by this novel’s end, alert…
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Animal Attraction
Jill Shalvis has a reputation for writing light, funny, sexy romances. Her latest, Animal Attraction, blows that reputation to smithereens. Make no mistake, Animal Attraction is funny and hot as…
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Reckless
“Move your bleedin’ arse,” Miss Charlotte Spenser’s maid, Meggie, said to her.” With these opening words, Ms. Stuart, in the second book in her historical Rohan trilogy, pulls the reader…
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Dangerous in Diamonds
This fourth and last of Madeline Hunter’s Rarest Blooms series, tells the tale of Tristan, the Duke of Castleford, and Daphne Joyes, the proprietor of The Rarest Blooms, an unusual…
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